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Briefly Noted

Death of the Black-Haired Girl, by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In this campus novel, the accidental death of a vivacious and impulsive student reverberates through the lives of those who knew her. The student is in love with her philandering adviser, and he attempts to break off their liaison before his pregnant wife arrives for the holidays. The student spirals out of control, much to the concern of her best friend, the school counsellor, and her father, an alcoholic widower. During the ensuing tragedy, these varying perspectives give Stone the means to examine thorny moral questions about love, fidelity, faith, fate, wasted opportunity, and “the temptation of oblivion.”

Dirty Love, by Andre Dubus III (Norton). The four linked stories in this discomfiting collection are set in old mill towns north of Boston. Nobody does quiet desperation better than Dubus. A middle-aged project manager discovers his wife’s infidelity by hiring a detective who films her trysts. A bartender tells himself he’s a poet and self-destructs when he meets a woman who believes in him. The links between narratives enhance the tension of the whole: a lecherous neighbor glimpsed in the first story is the father of the troubled teen-age girl in the last. She is the victim of a traumatic online shaming and goes to live with her ninety-year-old great-uncle, a war-scarred believer in second chances, who points out that “the river shines under the sun,” even though “everyone knows how dirty it is.”

Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’An, by Denise A. Spellberg (Knopf). In January, 2007, the first Muslim ever elected to Congress swore the oath of office on a Qur’an once owned by Thomas Jefferson. There was an irony to the moment, according to Spellberg’s account of attitudes toward Islam in the early American republic. Anti-Muslim slurs were common, and Islam was beyond “the outer limit” of any acceptable creed. But for this very reason Jefferson saw it as a test of the country’s commitment to religious tolerance. Other founding fathers were “at once hopeful and cynical”: they considered giving full rights to Muslim citizens, but only because the prospect appeared purely hypothetical. Meanwhile, “America’s actual Muslim inhabitants”—West African slaves—remained “invisible” to these slave-owning statesmen.

The Leonard Bernstein Letters, edited by Nigel Simeone (Yale). At 4 A.M. on June 9, 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Leonard Bernstein to thank him for arranging the music at R.F.K.’s funeral. “I thought it the most beautiful music I had ever heard . . . this strange music of all the gods who were crying.” Her letter is the most touching in this collection of letters, both to and from Bernstein, which shows, among other things, that he almost abandoned “West Side Story” over a conflict with the librettist Arthur Laurents. The letters Bernstein received—“You are a homosexual and may never change,” his wife wrote, soon after their marriage—are often more revealing than the ones he wrote. Bernstein is too often performing, full of bravado, and sheds little light on his complexities.

Tom O’Donnell is an author and TV writer. His illustrated middle-grade book “Hamstersaurus Rex” is out now.